[NeilBlanchard]

We now have a lot of new data:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxbOS...layer_embedded

http://www.skepticalscience.com/lake...gyn-video.html

This is incredibly important work because:

The Lake El'gygytgyn region was not glaciated during any of the ice ages. As a consequence, the >300m accumulated sequence of lake sediments represents a continuous, undisturbed sedimentary record going all the way back from the present to the aftermath of the impact.

The team succeeded in 2009 in extracting cores spanning this entire 3.6 million year period.

The oldest continuous ice core records to date extend 123,000 years in Greenland and 800,000 years in Antarctica: the Lake El'gygytgyn cores go way back beyond those times and provide an unprecedented view of the past climate of the Arctic.

Results show that during the Pleistocene (2.588 million - 11.7 thousand years ago), there were a number of super-interglacials - like the present period but much wetter and several degrees warmer in the Arctic, during which the Greenland and West Antarctic ice-sheets didn't just melt a bit. They disappeared.